This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

Albert Einstein: “I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.” (To P. Moos, March 30, 1950. Einstein Archives 60-587)

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Not All In Line? Saul Steinberg @100

Today June 15 2014 is 100th Birth Anniversary of one of the greatest cartoonists of all time: Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg: "I am a writer who draws."

Bob Mankoff:

"When Steinberg did the cartoon of the two men duelling in the mouth of a
giant alligator, and the one with the assortment of question marks, in the
early sixties, his cartoons became equal parts philosophy and art, and no part
mirth.

And, truthfully, if this evolution in Steinberg’s style hadn’t happened, there
wouldn’t be a five-hundred-and-ninety-one-page tome about him.

But I must admit that I’m a big fan of his early cartoons..."

Vasant Sarwate's (वसंत सरवटे) is very fond of the late Saul Steinberg's cartoons, particularly his later ones.

In his book 'Vyangkala- Chitrakala', 2005 ('व्यंगकला - चित्रकला'), he says this about Saul Steinberg's cartoon above:

(The
moment we see the picture we are amused by realizing error in it. Later
when one thinks one starts to get the deeper meaning to it. There is no
point demanding the absolute truth in this world; that kind of truth is
impossible to attain anywhere and there is no remedy other than
accepting the reality. The picture suggests such kind of thoughts.)

So what was the truth (or TᴚUTH?) about the life of the cartoonist himself?

Deirdre Bair tries to answer it in 'Saul
Steinberg: A Biography'.

What do some of the reviews of the book say?

JANET MASLIN, The New York Times, December 13 2012:

"...The overly protective Saul Steinberg Foundation did Steinberg a huge
disservice by forcing Ms. Bair to paraphrase documents and denying her the
right to reprint more than a smattering of his art.

Those obstacles might not have been wholly insurmountable, but Ms. Bair does
a flat job of paraphrasing, and she displays scant critical insight into the
many tics, motifs and obsessions that run throughout Steinberg’s work. She also
fails to convey any sense of the vaunted Steinberg charisma — although, as she
says in an afterword, interviewees would typically smile at his memory and say
something like, “What a wonderful man he was, and oh, how I miss him!” The
wonderful man is absent from “Saul Steinberg.” In his place is a cranky,
abrasive misanthrope who somehow made himself popular with many big droppable
names..."

'cranky,
abrasive misanthrope'? So did he look like this?

courtesy: The Saul Steinberg
Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A Saul Steinberg drawing that was published in
The New Yorker in 1954

DEBORAH SOLOMON says about the book:"...Who was Saul Steinberg? His acquaintances
thought of him as an elegant dandy who seemed catlike in his refinement. In his
prime, he lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, dined out most every night
and held forth at dinner parties with piquant erudition and wit. But behind the
thick glasses and mandarin mask lay a haunted figure, a fearful man who visited
indignities upon himself and those around him. As Bair reveals, his love life
was a string of infidelities, and crabbiness was his default mood...

...By then he had met Hedda Sterne, an abstract painter and fellow Romanian
émigré who valued books and reading as much as he did. Together, they practiced
speaking English and declared a moratorium on their native Romanian, “a
language of beggars and policemen,” as Steinberg scoffed. They married in 1944,
at City Hall in Manhattan. Just a few weeks later, they were entertaining a
pregnant friend when Sterne looked out from the kitchen into an adjoining room
and was startled to see her husband passionately kissing their guest. “In a way,
sex was his life,” Sterne later said. “He deprived himself of true union
because he was not ever in love.”..."

(The New York Times, November 21 2012)

JONATHAN
LOPEZ says in WSJ, November 30 2012:

"...He pursued affairs and even propositioned the teenage daughters of
acquaintances, for which he was reprimanded by outraged parents. On one
occasion, according to Ms. Bair, he invited a friend's 19-year-old daughter—a
girl he had known since she was in diapers—to spend a weekend in the Hamptons
in order, he said, to enjoy some time in the country. Drawing upon her
interview with the girl—now an adult—Ms. Bair informs us that "in the
middle of the night, she woke up, 'petrified with fear,' to find him in her
bed. He embraced her, but she 'froze and wouldn't budge,' until he eventually
'just sort of gave up and went to his own bed...'"

Pages

Henry Miller: "A picture… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book, a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One picture speaks to you, another doesn’t… Some pictures invite you to enter, then make you a prisoner. Some pictures you race through, as if on roller skates. Some lead you out by the back door. Some weigh you down, oppress you for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, make you weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair."...Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"